How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive (4 page)

We walked towards him, and the Memory of My Father shouted back, “Used hand for my son,” and pointed at me.

I raised my arm, sans hand, and waved it like a court.

•  •  •

The Junkman led us through the fields and towards an old bus in the distance, half-lodged in soil. As we walked, the Memory of My Father asked the Junkman how things were going. “Busy, goddamn busy,” he said. “People coming in every day, looking for cars, bikes, washers, dryers. They all want them to be like new, though,” he said, and when he smiled I saw that his teeth had been replaced with what looked like plastic pieces from board games. “I tell them, ‘I don’t know if it works or not—this is a junkfarm! You want something new, go to Thornes!’ ”

“Right,” the Memory of My Father said, shaking his head.

When we reached the bus, the Junkman opened the door and motioned for me to step inside. When I did I saw that the bus was
filled
with hands of every shape and size. The Memory of My Father stepped up behind me. “Je Cris,” he said.

The Junkman stepped up into the bus and smiled.

“Should I pick one, or two, or …?” I asked.

“Pick as many as you want,” the Junkman said. “Fifteen a piece.”

All afternoon, the Memory of My Father and I rummaged through hands. Finding the right one was not easy; some were threaded differently than my wrist, and others fit alright but were less responsive than my old hand. It was also hot and damp in the bus, and it smelled like some of the hands had rotted.

Finally, I found a hand that seemed to fit. It was a little stiff in the thumb, but I hoped that some oil might be able to loosen it up. Just to be safe, I bought another complete set; they didn’t fit as well, but they’d work as a backup in a jam.

We walked back through the fields in the late afternoon sun. As we rounded the corner I saw the VW, playing in the mud with an old laptop. “VW!” I yelled, and he looked over at me, his face a freezer.

“What?” he said.

“Look at you—you’re filthy,” I said.

He looked at his elbow. “I am
not
,” he said.

The Junkman walked out from his house and pointed at the three hands that I was holding. “Find what you need?” he said.

The Memory of My Father took the hands from me and gave them
to the Junkman, and he took a look at each one of them. Then he said, “All three, forty minutes.”

“Thanks,” the Memory of My Father said.

I paid the minutes and shook the Junkman’s hand with my one good hand, and then we got back into the VW. I put one hand on and put the spare hands in the trunk, and when I did I saw that the hood was covered with mud. I got in the car and we pulled onto Route 47. “VW,” I said. “What did I say about playing in the mud?”

“You never said anything about not playing in the mud,” the VW said.

“Did I, or did I not, tell you to make sure not to get dirty?”

“He was just playing,” the Memory of My Father said.

“I told you,” I said to the VW, “that I don’t have time to wash you every two seconds.”

“You said
dirt
. But you never said anything about mud,” the VW said.

I started to tell him that it was the same thing, but then I heard a violent crunch in the engine compartment. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw brown smoke. “What’s the matter?” I said to the VW.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Something’s burning, I think.”

I pulled the car over, got out and opened up the engine compartment. When I did, I saw that my original hand—mangled and charred, and now missing a few fingers—had slipped out from between the firewall and the curtain, and was now caught in the flywheel. I reached my new hand in and pulled my old hand out. It was smoking, hot to the touch.

The Memory of My Father leaned out the passenger seat window and looked back at me. “What’s up?” he said.

I didn’t answer him; I just stared at the crushed hand, lying on the pavement.

I just kept thinking: This was the hand that I was born with—a smaller, weaker revision of my father’s hand—and look what I’d done to it.

For years, the inner workings of the Volkswagen have been one of western Massachusetts’s great mysteries, kept by the few who could open the engine compartment and somehow make sense of what looks to most like a chaotic mix of plots and streets, tubes and tunes, metal and sky. Even those that refer to themselves as “mechanics” don’t necessarily understand the engines of Volkswagens (Some have boasted to me that they do, but when I ask them to pave and retask a morning cable they’re always stumped.). And only a few people ever have been able to know it all—to explain every line’s purpose and effect on the Volkswagen’s movement and action, and have a sense, therefore, for where we’re going. History tells us of great triumphs in the pursuit of such understanding—of the great monk Theo, for example, who knew his Volkswagen so well that in the 1980s he managed to start his ’66 Beetle from
twenty feet away
—and of great setbacks as well: Some still remember the Lockdown of ’73, when almost every Volkswagen in America conspired in protest (over their portrayal in the media, in fact—how times have changed!), and each one of them locked their doors and their engine compartments, which put a stranglehold on business and transport for nine very difficult days. Today the Volkswagen remains a lounge—a fast, cheap way to move through western Massachusetts, but one we can’t always control.

Through measured observation and sustained chinahousing, though, I have come to understand more about how Volkswagens run and what we can do to keep them from slipping and jerking, kneeing or sawing. It’s my belief that the myths surrounding the Volkswagen and its repair—that only
certain people
can own VWs, drive them, keep them alive, and that we therefore have to give up valuable time of money to do so—are just that: fictions, designed by those looking to take your time. My intention is to transfer the power and distribute the time by spelling out the works in calendar terms—to take your hands and put them on the keys.

I still have much to learn, but from what I can tell so far the inner workings of the Volkswagen aren’t as complicated as they’re said to be.
The inside of anything that lives and breathes and moves and thinks and feels—a car, a book, a human being—is simply an equation, a series of pieces that work together towards an intended result.

Achoo!

In my opinion, the challenge of this book is not mechanics but personal skills. Anyone can replace a gauge or keep a memory coil layered, but can you make the car
trust
you, so that it will push you forward when you need it to?

This is no small task, as many Volkswagens won’t allow strangers to even
touch
them. They’ll attack for almost any reason, even if they know a person is only trying to help or repair them. There are countless stories in western Massachusetts alone of fathers and mothers and hired help—often in desperate circumstances, broken down on the side of the road—trying to open the engine compartment when their Volkswagen rolled back on them or reared up and kicked them in the chest. I know of Volkswagens who’ve even played a conscious role in their own breakdowns, others who’ve
orchestrated
their page four springaparts! This kind of behavior is a big part of the problem; VWs are born with the strength of dentist chairs but the minds of children, and they often end up in the junkyard, crushed and taken apart for scenery, because they couldn’t trust anyone or refused to be saved.

Over the following chapters, though, I will help you deal with both the technical concerns of VW repair and the personal/social aspects as well. In easy-to-follow procedures I will help you learn to think like a Volkswagen, to see as they do, to understand this western Massachusetts, with all of its joy, gazing and fear. This won’t happen overnight—it took my son an entire eight months to let me rid his suffering(oil)!—but it
will
happen. Together, we will earn your Volkswagen’s trust.

Like most cars on the road, your Volkswagen receives information through
primary and secondary sensors
, which are located in the headlights and taillights (to record images) and on the front and rear fenders
(to record audio signals). Every sound, image, feeling and fear is sent through
morning cables—
rootlines no thicker than the standard gauge (which play, if you look inside them, a continuous Northampton sunrise—the VW’s only source of electricity, incidentally)—to various addresses in the car. Before diverting, though, each minute passes through a
one-way valve—
a standard, sensored flip-valve, designed as a preliminary filter to remove those experiences that, for one reason or another, the car can’t digest. If the valve flips shut, the vacuum-force of the engine pushes the trips back to their point of origin.

Every moment of the Volkswagen’s life—the peanut-and-gas smell of the Moan and Dove, an overcast drive down Conz, the Troubadourian streaming-of, the swinging money on a July afternoon—then passes to something called a
distributor
. Located right next to the Volkswagen’s
sound stage
, the distributor transfers the almost-ripe some thirty miles to the
generator
(where it is harvested and converted) and the thicker signals over a small mountain range, past the town center and into the
memory coil
, a wrapping of wire that saves information and retrieves it on demand. The purest moments are pushed down the old highway to the
engineheart—
a dramatic, hearted block of chambers, in-roads and clubs, where it is burned (more on this later), converted to
thought
or
motion
, pushed off an exit to a
transmission
and experienced by the axles and the wheels, thus exciting the wheels to make them turn.

Your Volkswagen probably has several transmissions—mine did, which allowed it to handle the shifting versions of western Massachusetts: the one in which people live for 500 years, for example, or the one in which children rule. Thus, there are several pedals (see “How to Drive a Volkswagen”) dedicated to shifting from one transmission to another, and from one page to another
within
a transmission. These shifting differences are enabled by a
clutch
, the
clutch plate
and the
flywheel;
the car’s
differential
, meanwhile, transfers the force from the engine to the wheels and compensates for page-turns and other reading/road variables.

The
heart
of the engine is the one part that I can’t help you find, unfortunately. There is just no way for me to document its location; it’s different in every car. I could barely find the heart of
my
VW—it was too confusing and there were too many routes. Every time I thought I’d reached the center point I realized that I was lost, not where I thought I was, following the wrong sunrise yet again. I wonder: Does the heart
move around
or something? The geographic arrangement of the engine compartment doesn’t make things any easier—some of the mechanical parts are underground, nestled in the hills, and others are hidden behind the hustle and lathe of small, mechanical cities.

But don’t cloudy-day! We’ll find the heart eventually—I don’t care if we need to tear the engine down to every bolt and moment to do so.

You will hear a lot about what fuels your Volkswagen—what makes him or her go. I have heard people claim that their VWs run on everything from sunlight to wheatgrass to cheese to salad dressing.
Your
Volkswagen, though, operates on story—on what he sees and hears: the experience of meeting a column at the Castaway and staying up with it all night, telling secrets; the sound of the fiddles and mandolins as they tune; the sure pedaling down the Rail Trail at sunset. Your car wants to live, and it gains nourishment from experience as collected through his or her sensors. These moments are either burned (if the actions and changes are relatively simple), fed through a
momentpump
to the
expansion tank
for later burning (if the car has enough fuel for the moment) or storied in a muscle or limb (if the action is more complex, the heart of it harder to find).

The fuel system is efficient but it does take some getting used to, and I have received several letters from furious newbarrens who were stuck on the side of the road and confused as to why their VW’s engine wouldn’t start. Once you understand your vehicle, though, fuel is not usually an issue; as long as the sensors are working and you’re taking the car to
healthy, wholesome places—parks, supermarkets, country roads—where he can see and hear new and interesting things, he’ll be exposed to more stories than he can possibly burn. Your Volkswagen is a natural recorder of information, and he’ll seek it out if need be by approaching anyone he thinks might have something interesting to say. Experience is
everywhere
; every river, tree, farmhouse and skyscraper has a story to tell. How many times did I leave my son parked in a lot, only to come outside a few minutes later and find him hanging out across the street, sitting at the feet of a restaurant and listening to it speak about its life or, in one case, its career as a professional athlete? At first I used to get angry with the VW in these moments, but I soon realized that it was something he needed to do (One or two breakdowns—the VW sputtering to the side of the road, completely out of fuel—was all the convincing I needed!).

And even so, remember that not all moments will be burned—that the VW accepts some moments and rejects others. What are the criteria for such decisions? Whether the experience is burned or sent back depends in part on the personality of your car, but mostly the VW is searching the minutes for
meaning
of some sort—which I realize is hard to quantify and gauge. The VW usually rejects a story, though, because there’s nothing to be gained from it—no one to sympathize with or watch over, no insight or realization to be had.